


Marigold

by CeliaBlair24



Series: They Who Hung The Moon [3]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mercury Feels, Past Character Death, Pre- Cinder Fall, Pre-RWBY canon, Young Mercury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 17:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15466635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeliaBlair24/pseuds/CeliaBlair24
Summary: Mercury remembers it all quite clearly, the day he'd learnt the meaning of death.





	Marigold

**Author's Note:**

> This serves as a sort of add-on to Camellia, though you don't actually have to read the series to understand it. It would, however, be very much appreciated. :)

There was a saying, something from when he was…younger, much younger. His father, at least, always made mention of it, and any visitor to the Black family matriarch, well, they seemed to agree.

_Death, that's normal._

_It happens._

Of course, when Mercury had been younger, he didn't quite agree. Death? Dying? Fathomless concepts to a boy barely seven, to a boy who, then, hadn't yet known the concept of murder, the cold, bloodied truth to his own comfortable life and his father's growing alcohol dependence.

And then— and then he'd had his own taste of fate. Of death and blood and violence.

He had been… nine, perhaps. Maybe ten. Mercury tried so hard to forget sometimes, tried so hard to forget that his own sense of time had tiptoed off to some unforeseen abyss and he'd, well, he'd forgotten already the hour of the day, whether the sky had been dark, light or gray, whether or not he'd truly been  _there_.

He did remember, however, the  _after._ When everything had been said and done.

_Death… it happens._

There'd been blood on the floor, a seeming sea of it all, and the taste of ash hung in the air, mixing itself with the rancid smell of something  _other._

Mercury then— Mercury then had not known, couldn't have known.

_The smell of death hung in the air. Copper, drying and old and rancid. Blood spilt, slithering from between the white floor tiles._

Mercury remembers that, Mercury remembers….

Walking in, he'd heard fighting— his parents fighting again. Mom screaming, Dad ranting; something old and worn and known to him for so long now. Long, years long, years snaking along an undefined line to this defined future, definite and wrong and  _wrong_  and… and he'd heard a  _bang!_

He'd heard a bang, he'd heard a scream. Then nothing.

_Nothing_.

Not for the longest time. No, not at all.

Time held still, then; minutes trickled by at a snails' pace. Slipping by on their homes wall-clock, a sticky, frozen thing. One minute was like an hour, and that hour stretched on forever. Forever and ever and ever… and then— then it'd stopped. And then time had flowed on.

And then he'd heard a scream.

His fathers' scream.

_Blood split, slithering between white floor tiles._

_The world had blanked, muted, stopped for all he cared._

_And when it started again… when it started…._

The funeral was short.

Short and somber and somber and short.

Little Mercury had sat right in the front, chair too high for him, chair too high and his legs had dangled off it, barely scraping against the dewy, green grass of the old town cemetery.

Dad hadn't been there. Hadn't been there to reassure him….

_Mom?_

_Where was she?_

_Why wasn't she here?_

There was a saying when he was younger, so much younger. Something he hadn't believed,  _couldn't_  believe; hadn't himself seen.

Until he had.

Death… it happens.

_Time had flowed on, distorted._

_Time had flowed on, wrong._

_As the minutes passed and Mercury's mind settled, as his fathers' scream waned, pattered off into nothing, nothing… Mercury…._

It had happened so long ago, so long that time had long blurred the lines of what should have been familiar. But,  _but_  Mercury remembered still, remembered still the smell of ash and blood and death; ash and blood and death and  _other._ Mercury remembered still the blood staining the white tiled floor, the white tiled kitchen walls, and the counter and the bench and the legs of their small dining table chairs….

Mercury could remember still, remember still so,  _so_  clearly.

The day his mother died.

The day he learnt of death.


End file.
